About Me

Saturday, 23 September 2017

As I was rummaging around in a drawer containing my exquisite collection of finest-quality stationery today, you’ll never guess what I came upon? Give up? Well, it was this …

.. yes, straight up! (Ahem). Anyway, I'd forgotten I had this. Along with a PiL "Can" thing and a PiL "Mug" cup (from their Album promo splurge), it dates from my time working in a record shop in the mid-80s. Sharkish record reps would bestow them on gullible retail slaves like me thinking I'd order in lots of not-very-sellable product for the HMV singles counter. (Don't think I usually did though).

But what the hell is it? Apart from - obviously enough - being a stupid promotional plastic ruler (“Twelve inches of New Order”) that Factory Records knocked up to promote the Substance singles compilation in 1987, it's also part of Factory's self-referential - and slightly tedious - catalogue empire. FAC #203. Impressed? I think you're supposed to be.

If one were so inclined, I think you could do a whole "deconstructionist" number on this ruler. Reflecting on how its er, straight-edge anti-frivolous seriousness supposedly "mocks" more traditional music merchandise (sew-on/lapel badges, stickers, etc). The fact it's a ruler might be taken as a suggestion not just of the famed “austerity” of much of Factory's music, but also of the studious non-music realms of mathematics, architecture and design - fields the Factory aesthetic liked to play around with. But it's all a pose really. Clean, transparent plastic sits nicely with the look of Factory stuff at this time and people like me (aged 23) would have snaffled it up quite unembarrassedly, but in the end it's just a rather clunky (over-thick) ruler with a not-too-subtle message about the fact that your favourite Manchester doom-pop band has a decent back-catalogue of singles.

But merch is merch is merch, right? So I see people are these days paying over £100 on eBay to acquire this little piece of plastic. People, please. It's a ruler! A ruler. (By the way, if anyone else is trying to sell one of these on a popular online auction site, I strongly suggest they use these lines as part of their sales pitch: So what ya gonna do when the novelty has gone? / Yeah, what ya gonna do when the novelty has gone? There. They can have that idea for free).

By 1987 a grandiose Factory had sort of lost the plot if you ask me. Madchester seemed to be going to everyone's heads. Queues, air-horns, drugs and unapologetic consumerism were cool, and meanwhile almost anything was being given a FAC catalogue number - Hacienda House wines (geddit?), Factory notepaper, a G-MEX after-party, a Happy Mondays video shoot, Tony Wilson's nasal mucus (FAC #227.5; er, not really). Perhaps they should have just given up on those boring old records altogether and opened a massive souvenir shop or something …

No, looking back, things like this promo ruler are a bit of an embarrassment. Aside from the excellent nightclub (which hosted music), Factory was good because of the music. I appreciate that Saville's designs were an integral part of Factory's output, but I think it ends up looking ridiculous when design energy is expended on promotional fripperies like a ruler.

Anyway, as it happens my ruler (unlike my New Order records) is scratched. However hard I might try to flog it, I fear it's not going to get much on the open market. Sadly, I’ll have to abandon plans to sell it and invest the proceeds in a property empire. Furthermore, as this next photo rather suggests …

… the neither-very-durable-or-beautiful nature of the “Twelve inches of New Order” ruler means it only actually looks any good when held against something pleasant to look at - like wood. And indeed a terminally unfashionable-looking old wooden ruler I also found in my stationery drawer today is actually a far nicer artefact than the worth-one-hundred-quid-and-counting product from the glory days of Wilson/Saville associates.

Meanwhile, having had a quick riffle though the index of Peter Hook’s Substance tome just now, I could find no entry for … a ruler. Rightly enough, I suspect Mr Hook would rather play bass than mess around with bits of souvenir stationery.

Thursday, 14 September 2017

Sunday, 10 September 2017

I'm just back from my local Japanese restaurant where, among the nigiri, sushi and green tea, there was ... reggae. Sort of. Definitely some dub, burbling faintly away beneath the middle-class chit chat. Oh yes. Dub can be the polite cosmopolitan everywhere sound.

You know it, right? But, for all that it can sometimes seem like the perfect muzak for over-cosseted millennials, it's nothing of the sort. Turn up the volume and you soon hear why. Bass, bone-juddering shards of reverb, lyrics about poverty and Zion - it's not exactly the sound of car adverts or the supermarket aisles. In fact, it's quite another reality. Especially when you listen to the tablets of Linear B ...

Wednesday, 6 September 2017

As we all know, music for some people is basically an excuse for a little nostalgia.

And I mean a little. It's hardly Proustian reverie, this ultra-trivial "oh, this takes me back" use of music. Shouting out a few lines from a truly awful chart hit from 20 or 30 years ago. Saying something about how it used to be the "soundtrack" to when your were revising for your exams/going out with your first boyfriend/having a beloved dog anaesthetised (er, maybe not this one).

Yeah, it's music as a superficial marker for your deeply boring life. But I say no. NO! No more of this. Music isn't the bloody soundtrack. It IS your life. For fuck's sake. Everything else is the background. Or it would be in any well-ordered universe.

So, here's some more Niluccio on noise music. Music as an antidote to nostalgia (or possibly music to provoke a certain kind of anti-nostalgia, nostalgia for an age yet to come). And in this 78 minutes of wonder-inducing noise, there's not a single infinitesimal thing that will make you hunger for the past ...

Thursday, 3 August 2017

So I gather that there are all these new music bloggers and smart-alec writers for the music press (well, what passes for the music press online these days). And they're all writing about the latest releases (well, the ones they got sent as promo copies for review purposes). And, shockingly, they haven't got time for my music blog or the marvellous music I showcase here.

Sad isn't it? Terrible, really. Actually, I suspect that they're even sniggering about Niluccio on noise. Laughing about its quaint design. Its rather ordinary name. Its not-exactly-fashionable attachment to er, well whatever it is I'm attached to. Yeah, they think Niluccio on noise is old hat. Worthless. But ... fuck 'em. As Albert Chevalier rightly says, they can' take a roise out of oi just because oi likes what oi likes. After all, I am who I am because of the music I like. And I like the music I like because of the person I am. (Are you following all this?). Er yes, you could say my condition makes me me ...

Sunday, 23 July 2017

Sunday, 9 July 2017

It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it ... isn't that the truth? So never mind that I'm just a piddling music blogger with a minuscule (non-existent?) following and a possibly even smaller reputation in the music blogosphere. Because .. er, I'm doing it all very stylishly. Or with "love". Or with superb wit. (Or maybe none of these things). But, well, I guess I am at least doing it. Churning out these wondrous podcasts, that is. And generally sharing my wayward thoughts on music, on noise, on noisy music ...

Actually though, after more than a decade of those podcasts (OK, just CDRs originally) and a fair few years of the music blog, maybe it's time to knuckle down and get serious. I need to develop a recognisable product. A style. Develop and market a clever little niche. No more of this mixing things up. No-one's ever going to like the Niluccio on noise blog if I keep doing that. So no more pretentious eclecticism from here on in. Just one thing and one thing only. It'll be a wholly new Niluccio on noise blog. The Conservative brand ...

Wednesday, 5 July 2017

Watch out, The Rebel is in residence! Yes, Ben Wallers kindly gave up his Wednesday evenings throughout the gladsome month of June to bring his particular brand of misanthropic country-drone to The Windmill in Brixton. How nice.

But no, I’m not going to wax lyrical about Mr Rebel’s mutant-country sounds. They kind of speak for themselves - check him out on YouTube, you lazy f-f-fucker! But nevertheless, having soaked up four Wednesdays’ worth of Wallers-esque misery here are a few things I've learnt:

*Somewhat surprisingly, there seems to be a small coterie of fans who will turn out for The Rebel's gigs, determined to sing along to stuff about how the human race deserves to die (“Die die die human scum”). Actually, it does (deserve to die). This produced the rather incongruous sight of aficionados doing their best to turn his country-guitar drone, his discordant squirts of electronic noise and his obscure foghorn rants into some kind of party music.

*As befits any decent artist doing a so-called residency, The Rebel varied his sets from week to week, and - maybe more interestingly - seemed to be playing some of the same songs differently from one week to the next.

*His actual appearance was changeable and interesting. One week he was sporting a baseball cap and louche preppy shirt and tie, another a full two-tone green cricket strip (Pakistan’s?). By week three we had what looked like some kind of US army field kit for its Middle East operations, and week four brought us a more “typical” Rebel look - a dark-grey business suit and cowboy hat. My own favourite bit was how he seemed to have smeared his arms and face with gobs of green and orange paint one week. Er, nice.

*He’s serious. And this is no lightweight music. Each week he ground the audience into submission with more than an hour of hardcore noise-country (or whatever the hell it is). I liked most of it, in particular some of the lyrics (“I sat on the stairs with a noose around my neck / Now I'm on the 242 going into town”) (my own bus to work!), or a song about having a gig to do near Hackney Downs station (er, my local train station!). And drones and curdled misanthropy notwithstanding, when The Rebel sang a song about knowing someone when they "had no pubes", it could be genuinely touching and sad.

The Rebel: still hoping for a call-up to Pakistan's one-day side

In the end what’s good about The Rebel is that he sticks to his guns. I remember one of his gigs from about 12 years ago where a little gaggle of beery blokes kept theatrically groaning “What is this shit?” Hmm, as Wallers says in one of his songs, “You only mock the avant garde / Because it’s ... a ... bit ... too ... hard”.

One of the highlights of The Rebel's Brixton extravaganza was a song where he intoned/incanted the name “Sophie” about 40 times in (slightly uneven) succession. Strangely disturbing. And another memorable moment was where this non-crowd-pleaser incited a bizarre singalong of “Get the fucking Tories out” (repeated about 15 times) to the tune of Phibes’ drum ‘n’ bass We Run Tingz (which your humble blogger was DJing through the PA).

And what’s more, the anti-Tory diatribe nearly worked! The Rebel’s GTFTO jungle chant took place on 7 June. Two days later the shell-shocked Conservative government lost its majority. The Rebel had cast his vote …

Friday, 30 June 2017

Nothing fancy - no elaborate advice about how to safeguard your music files against cyber-attack or anything like that. Just some very basic observations, all rather material and old-fashioned. Like noting how (some) charity shops put strips of sellotape on their CDs to deter you from stealing the discs rather than coughing up your greasy £1 for a copy of The White Stripes' Elephant or whatever.

When I worked in a record shop in the mid-1980s we'd get quite a few opportunist grab-it-and-leg-it shoplifters bursting out of the doors in a sudden dramatic flurry of activity. We staff, poor harried individuals trying to shrinkwrap 250 Whitney Houston LPs as soon as our little hands could get it done, would be summoned to give chase. Oh what fun! We'd charge through the pedestrianised streets of this Midlands city, scaring shoppers, scattering pigeons and as far as I can remember never catching the fleet-footed thief.

Looking back I'm glad we didn't. If they wanted that bloody Bruce Springsteen cassette so badly - good luck to them. But still, the security-heavy routine would continue. A low-wage, uniformed security guard on the door. Information circulated about who to look out for among the "shoplifter gangs".

Is music so valuable? Do we need to "protect" it so vigilantly? I dunno, could it be we've got our priorities ever so slightly wrong ...?

Thoughts like these came to me the other day when I attempted a little bit of breaking and entering of my own. Having borrowed some CDs from a local library (yeah I'm old-school like that), I got home to find the librarian had forgotten to take the bloody security tabs out. Should I plod all the way back to the library? Er, no. Far better to just gently tease the tabs out. Except, 20 sweaty minutes later I'd half-destroyed two CD cases by hacking away with a screwdriver and pen-knife. Ruined! What to tell the library? Naturally, being too embarrassed to admit the truth, I ended up going back with a cock-and-bull story about losing them, offering to pay for replacements. See, kids - crime of any sort definitely doesn't pay.

Meanwhile, back in the world of legitimately-owned personal music collections, I know someone with a large number of reggae records who's forever fretting that somebody's going to break into his place and steal them. I can't see it. Records are surprisingly heavy and, well, just records. Do people break into houses to steal vinyl (even allowing for the ridiculous prices new-style "connoisseur" shops like Flashback Records charge for this stuff)? Surely not.

But that's (sort of) my point. People invest a bit too much value in musical artefacts - the "rare" vinyl, the limited-edition this or that. Most people don't want your music. They've got their own - which they almost certainly think is better than yours anyway. Charity shops can probably afford to have a few CDs stolen without getting all uptight about it - after all, most of their stuff's donated to them. And my local library can probably manage without using super-secure CD cases. Bloody hell - it's only a ten-quid Punk 45: There Is No Such Thing As Society compilation - it's not a gold bar!

Stolen records: we're all over-valued products now

The Punk 45 comp is good actually and I don't mind having now paid £10.50 for it (50p being the original loan fee). Fine. I'm enjoying hearing music from The Cigarettes, The Swell Maps and the Prefects. And if ever some perfidious punk-thief should gain unauthorised access to my flat and run off with it ... well, I guess I'll cope. In fact, I'll probably just shout after them: "Oi, don't you know? There's no such thing as a record worth stealing!"

Thursday, 29 June 2017

So there I am, idly scanning a Guardian interview with Kraftwerk's Ralf Hütter, when I see the following remark from Hütter:

Basically, nothing has changed. It’s still all about composition. And for the last 50 years, it has always been like this. There have always been speakers all around - radio speakers, televisions. A little more [now], but then again … it’s about the intensity. All the rest is just noise.”

Yeah, and that's what this blog is about - noise. So don't diss it Mr Hütter! As it happens, the rather dull Kraftwerk "legend" seems to have little interest in much outside his own self-regarding world (Twitter, for example, is "basically … very banal") and you get the feeling he's absorbed too much of the adulation surrounding Kraftwerk to retain much objectivity or curiosity. Ah, the fate of all successful musicians ...

Or, looking again, is Hütter actually just saying it's the music that matters not the medium (whether it's streamed on a phone or listened to on an ancient hi-fi or whatever)? Er, could be, and if so ... I agree. Whether you're listening to Trans-Europe Express or the latest Niluccio on noise podcast, it's the music not the mode that matters.

And speaking of the latest Niluccio on noise podcast, here's one I prepared earlier .... It's the very embodiment of Hütter's "all the rest is noise". Indeed, it's all noise! But don't be swayed by Hütter's pejorative use of "noise". Noise is life. And in this, I am right and he is wrong. I'm the real tough guy ...

Say what? Jamaican patois, eh? And what does Wikipedia have to say on the matter? The following: "Jamaican Patois features a creole continuum (or a linguistic continuum): the variety of the language closest to the lexifier language (the acrolect) cannot be distinguished systematically from intermediate varieties (collectively referred to as the mesolect) or even from the most divergent rural varieties (collectively referred to as the basilect)."

Hmm. All clear now? Anyway, I think it's fair to say that patois has its origins in surviving (or trying to) the experience of slavery. It's a language of survival. It's what it takes to survive ...

Friday, 9 June 2017

Welcome to Podcast #142. You are indeed very welcome. In this emporium of aural delights you will find many of those rare and alluring sounds you've long been looking for. There are slow songs and there are fast ones. There are compositions in a multitude of languages. There is even a song from a band who have been together for four years. (Fancy that).

But if you don't find what you're searching for in this modest palace of sound, then ... er, you must go elsewhere. Where? Try M Kessler's Hardware shop ...

Sunday, 7 May 2017

Friday, 5 May 2017

So I was reading a supposedly "insightful" article the other day telling me that there are very good reasons why a lot of people (most?) more or less stop listening to new music in their 30s and 40s. The argument seemed to be something like "nothing's quite the same when you're not young anymore, first loves are the most impactful ...blah blah". Load of rubbish, of course. For one thing, "love" when you're 18 is very likely nothing but teenage desire (just lust). For another, a lot of music you listen to when you're young turns out to be pretty mediocre. Give it another few decades of exposure to music and you start to put things into different perspectives.

So why do people give up on new music when they themselves are old and decrepit (around the age of 32)? Er, I guess "real life" kicks in. You know, life. Jobs, families, other stuff. Plus, they get distracted by millions of non-music entertainment things, especially television, that great satanic anti-music medium. But OK, maybe people get a bit boring as well. Creaky and conservative. If you ask me, they should stop thinking about their tiresome responsibilities, their loathsome families, their mindless jobs ... and spend more time in the many factories of new Niluccio music ...

Tuesday, 2 May 2017

Sunday, 30 April 2017

You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow.

Yeah, I know how to whistle, thanks. And unfortunately so do some of the people that go to the same gigs as me. Why's that a problem? Well ... SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEECHHHHHHH! And ... PHSIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSST!

Sorry, some idiot was whistling right by me just now ...

It's quite simple really. I go to gigs to hear some musicians do their stuff (good, mediocre, whatever) not some show-off guy (it's usually a man) doing one of those very piercing, high-volume whistles at the end of each song. Not only is it excruciatingly dull (whistling in the gaps between songs with metronomic predictability), but its laddish exhibitionism is the exact opposite of what I like about gigs in the first place. (Hey, look at me everyone! Check out MY appreciation of the band. Cool, eh?)

This sort of behaviour drags any musical event down. Similarly, those shouts of "yeahhhh!" - always now done in pseudo-American accents as if the humble British gig-goer can only be openly enthusiastic if disguised as an American. Dull.

No, in general I prefer an audience (preferably small in the first place) that's rather parsimonious with its appreciation. A little light clapping will do. Be grudging with your responses, not fawning over every small thing the band does. I usually refrain from even clapping if everyone else is whooping and frenziedly applauding. What's the point? The only time I actually make an effort with a bit of (relatively) sustained applause is when there's a single-figures-type audience and er, every pair of clapping hands counts.

It's a fine line sometimes. It's actually better if an audience almost doesn't like (or doesn't care about) the musicians out front supposedly entertaining them. As with those restaurant-bar affairs where a jazz pianist is toiling aware in the background just to provide a little atmosphere for the diners. Or, more interestingly, like those occasions where the band shows something like actual disdain for the audience (Sex Pistols, Selfish Cunt), which is quickly reciprocated by those watching.

But back to whistling. On the one hand it's out-of-fashion in everyday life (when did you last hear someone whistling to themselves in the street?), yet on the other it's often excellent when used in musical compositions themselves. Meanwhile, during the heyday of raves it was virtually a requirement for audiences to go along with referee-type whistles, shrilly blowing away to the thumping house beats and acting as if they were contributing to the music themselves (they sort of were).

That was different though. Exhibitionists whistling at small indie-type gigs are just irritants. On this blog I've previously moaned about all sorts of annoying behaviour at gigs - from audience and bands alike. Niluccio, the moaner-in-chief. It's almost like I'm a sort of traffic cop or referee. PHSIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSST. Yes! I'm blowing the whistle on people whistling at gigs ...

Thursday, 20 April 2017

Not sure what to listen to? Too much choice? Sick of those bloody mixes that YouTube keeping throwing your way? Tired of those "essential" Spotify playlists from know-it-all musos forcing their tastes on you? Yeah, me too. Sick of it all. Sick, sick, sick. Sick! There's only one way out. A new Niluccio on noise compilation ...

Yep! So actually, forget what I just said about know-it-all musos. The Niluccio on noise comps are different. Entirely different. They're above criticism. Totally sui generis. Surely you understand? When I'm criticising the ubiquity of "curated" music I'm not aiming any of my remarks at the Niluccio oeuvre. No. I'm not talking about them ...

Monday, 17 April 2017

"... it was called the Jungle of Screaming Souls. Just hearing the name whispered was enough to send chills down the spine ... Here, when it is dark, trees and plants moan in awful harmony. When the ghostly music begins it unhinges the soul and the entire wood looks the same no matter where you are standing. Not a place for the timid ...".

Wednesday, 29 March 2017

Phew, after my marathon all-nighter I've emerged from the experience drenched in sweat, shivering in the chill dawn air and absolutely dog tired. Euuuugghhhh! It's almost as if, as if … as if I’ve been to a nightclub or something. But no, I’ve been reading Dave Haslam’s Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues. Blimey! Gimme some more dexies, mate …

In other words, it's a long session at the decks. Four hundred and thirty pages' worth. It's by no means uninteresting. On the contrary. But Haslam goes in for breathless pack-it-all-in "slice-throughs". Lots of names thrown our way - bands, venues, towns, promoters, DJs, records - and a helter-skelter pelt through music scene after music scene. Across chapter after chapter. Here's an example: on page 300, with Haslam jogging us through one of many mini-episodes in the early-ish post-punk scene:

"On 5 June 1980, U2 played for John Keenan at the F-Club. The night before they'd been in Manchester at 'The Beach Club', an almost regular Tuesday night at Oozits, formerly known as the Picador (the first club owned by Manchester drag act Frank 'Foo Foo' Lammar). The Beach Club had been launched in April by a group of friends around the New Hormones label, and the City Fun fanzine, including, among many others, Richard Boon, Eric Random, Lindsay Wilson (Tony's wife) and Sue Cooper."

And so on. Feel the rush: of dates, locations, bands, DJs. Paragraphs twisting and turning among a never-ending thicket of people, places and musical acts. Like a lot of other musicians, poor old U2 pop up, keep their heads above water for a couple paragraphs, then get submerged again.

But hey, let me take this already-boring record off the turntable and flip it - let's see what's on the B-side … well, OK! A good tune or two. To my taste, Haslam is over-hurried and verging on the superficial with some of his broad-brush approach, but there's still a lot of interesting stuff in his book. A few of my favourite Life After Dark nuggets:

*According to Jeff Horton (the recent owner of the 100 Club: is he still?), in 1964 there were over 200 music venues in just Soho and the wider West End part of central London.

*The Jamaican sound system operator Duke Vin memorably described 1950s Britain as lifeless: "I couldn’t find nowhere for a dance. The country was dead".

*Haslam reckons that cinema was the primary means of popularising insurgent music - first jazz in the 1920s and 1930s, and then rock and roll in the 1950s. A fascinating point which I must admit I don't recall coming across previously.

*The future Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon staged an early Sex Pistols gig in the painting studio of the art department at Reading University by getting his course tutor to consider the performance a part of Boon's assessed course work. (Fail!)

*The Torch soul all-nighters in Tunstall near Stoke-on-Trent in 1972-3 managed to head off complaints by people who lived in the same street by employing them as cleaners at the club, apparently more or less putting them on the payroll so they wouldn't complain about noise and traffic.

Life After Dark,

with a rare photo of my dad 'hammering it' on the dancefloor in 1961

One of the things that comes cross very clearly in the book is the significance of key individuals, usually DJs and/or promoters, who did a lot to forge a scene in one or two key locations (in some cases these mercurial figures keep popping up in different cities in the midst of different music scenes). So you have the soul-R'n'B-and-much-else DJ Roger Eagle playing at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester in the 1960s, before re-appearing in 1976 with Eric’s in Liverpool and gigs for the Sex Pistols and early punk bands. Between times, he'd also run the Magic Village in Manchester, putting on psychedelic freakshows, playing Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Doors records. Far out, man.

Other key DJ/promoter/hustler impresario types include Andy Czezowski (The Damned, the Roxy club, the Fridge club) and Guy Stevens (the Scene mod/R'n'B club, The Clash). Not to mention Jimmy Savile. Haslam champions these figures (Eagle and Stevens especially) for caring about the music they played more than their own fame or earnings. It’s commendable, eminently likeable. But there are times in the book where Haslam seems to slide away from this "it's for the love of the music" value system. In a chapter on the New Romantics - Billy's, Blitz, the Batcave et al - he comments on Duran Duran and how they'd played several of their early pre-Rum Runners gigs in the small upstairs room (the "Star Club") of a Birmingham pub: "I guess there aren't many artists who'd be happy to spend their careers playing dives." Oh, they’re dives now, are they?

Coming in a chapter featuring quite a few popstar wannabies like John Taylor, you rather get the impression that here Haslam's excusing or subtly aligning himself with the careerists of the music world. It happens a few times in the book. Even the slightly romanticised final paragraph of Life After Dark features a set-piece scene of imagined excitement outside a venue with a "queue" and "taxis pulling up". This might be how it is where Haslam goes these days, but there aren't any taxis or queues outside the venues I go to. (Ahem).

I don't mean to disparage Haslam or his book. It's packed with interesting snippets (about 5,000 of them) and covers a lot of ground. His heart generally appears to be in the right place, but I think the book's just over-ambitious. On the plus side, it seems to be on its most secure footing when it's chronicling the scene Haslam was himself a part of - the Hacienda, house, rave and the 90s big beat / D'n'B fall-out. In this area I think Haslam is pretty good when discussing important topics like violence in the rave scene (something I sensed an undercurrent of myself at the Hacienda or Konspiracy in Manchester) or the still-continuing tragedy of Ecstasy deaths.

Unsurprisingly, he also seems securer talking about Manchester than any other city. On London, where I've lived for over 20 years, I think he's often wide of the mark. Especially with contemporary (or near-contemporary) London, in particular the "indie"/experimental scene, which I know most about. For example, he rightly points to Café Oto as an important venue for adventurous music programming in the city, but he ignores - or just doesn’t know about - numerous other venues: the Old Blue Last, DIY Space, Sound Savers, Boat Ting, the Windmill, New River Studios, the Shacklewell Arms, plus other now-deceased but recently-important places like Power Lunches, the Buffalo Bar or "ROTA" at the Arts Club. Meanwhile, out of London the best venue in modern-day Sheffield (the Audacious Art Experiment) or Nottingham (JT Soar) both fail to get a mention.

The sins of omission, eh?

But hold it! I should take this miserable, downbeat record off the wheels of steel and play something more uplifting. Yunno, kind of spirit of Hacienda 1989. Airhorns blasting. Blokes stripped to the waist dancing on the podiums.

In all likelihood me and my purple t-shirt-clad student mates ourselves danced to some of Mr Haslam's tunes back in our Madchester undergraduate days, so I feel I ought to end with a positive sentiment. In fact what better than quoting DJ Sasha remembering what it was like at Shelley's Lazerdome in Longton near Stoke-on-Trent during those heady rave times:

"It had a real innocent energy. The big thing for me was holding the crowd back; they'd be gagging to hear a record they knew, and as soon as they did the whole place would go mental. From that point onwards I had to completely go for it. I knew that as soon as I put that one record on the airhorns would go off and that would be it. I'd have to completely hammer it."

Woah, another hard day's night hammering it! Sasha, you should take a night off. Read a book or something. What about Life After Dark …?

Tuesday, 28 March 2017

As you may have noticed (and to quote Dennis Brown), we're living in changing times. (As opposed to all those other times that never changed. That just stayed the same).

Yeah, but that was in the past. Things are better now. There's plenty of activity these days. It's a veritable whirlpool of ever-changing stuff - new cars (some that aren't driver-less), new presidents (sad!), new politics (oh so new), new everything. It's getting so you can't even listen to a Niluccio dubpod without wanting to revolt and demand "new stuff". Yeah well, tough. Because this killer collection is a copy. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy (etc). Don't question, just obey ...

Wednesday, 15 March 2017

" ... Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don't hear a sound doesn't mean it's not out there. Dogs can hear it. Other animals. And I'm sure there are sounds even dogs can't hear. But they exist in the air, in waves. Maybe they never stop. High, high, high-pitched. Coming from somewhere ..."

Wednesday, 1 March 2017

Not sure if they're still listening to the Angelic Upstarts or Jimmy Pursey's lovely Sham 69, but some evidence of Malaysian youth's interest in bovver boy music. Or is it suedehead ska they have in mind? Or something different again? Anyway, this plaintive graffito presently adorns a wall in an unkempt bit of central Kuala Lumpur. Oi, oi, oi ....

Saturday, 25 February 2017

Anthony Storr's Music & The Mind is the book about music I didn't know I wanted to read. But I have read it and I'm glad I did.

It's not in any way a book about "popular" music, confining itself to classical music, not something I know much about. But Storr's book is still fascinating.

So, when Storr's going on about Hayden, Mahler, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven or Wagner, what he's doing is trying to get to the heart of how music affects human beings. Even more than that - he's asking what music is, what anthropological/cultural purpose it serves in human history. Stuff like that. It's not exactly the memoirs of a 90s Britpop drummer.

Michael, row the boat ashore

I won't try to recapitulate all of Storr's elegantly-written and carefully-argued book in this blog (sacrilege!) but here are a few things I found interesting from it:

*In pre-history music and language were probably the same thing. Primitive man made sounds that were a grunted mixture of the two, conveying all sorts of meanings, including helping to bond together groups, tribes or whatever. Later on, as speech began to develop, the musical part (yells, shrieks, moans, bits of early singing) began to be used in rituals - for preparation for conflict, for group cohesion etc (much as they have been for millennia since).

*For most of history music has actually mostly been used in conjunction with or as a “melodic imitator” of speech in one way or another. It's a comparatively recent thing (from about the mid-18th-century) for there to be purely instrumental music. Up until this period most people apparently viewed music without a vocal accompaniment as "inarticulate".

*As anyone who's ever been to a gig of any kind will know, music is intimately intertwined with bodily movement. Head nodding and toe-tapping even take place at classical concerts, and at rock gigs or dance clubs bodily movement is of course a major component of the entire experience. As reggae buffs know, it's all about riddim. And as Storr says:

"Rhythm is rooted in the body in a way which does not apply so strikingly to melody and harmony. Breathing, walking, the heartbeat, and sexual intercourse are all rhythmical aspects of our physical being".

Yep, sexual intercourse. Rocking and rolling.

*Somewhat amazingly, the first public venue designed specifically for musical performances only came into being in the late-17th-century - York Building in Villiers Street in London in around 1678. Up until then, music took place in other places - houses, churches etc.

*Music is fundamentally a human activity founded on the need to impose order. It isn't an imitation of nature however "musical" things like birdsong or babbling brooks can at first appear. As Storr puts it:

"Music can best be understood as a system of relationships between tones, just as language is a system of relationships between words ... Languages are ways of ordering words; political systems are ways of ordering society; musical systems are ways of ordering sounds. What is universal is the human propensity to create order from chaos".

Or cash from chaos! Anyway, Storr’s book has a lot else that's extremely interesting on the reasons for music and the effects it has on people collectively and individually. In the end Storr's excellent book is both a cerebral and a passionate argument for the value of music in our lives. Music, Storr notes, isn't some frippery, an add-on to our busy lives. It's a vital part of a richly textured existence:

"If there appears to be an escapist element in musical participation, it is because our culture is so concerned with achievement and the pursuit of conventional success that makes ordinary life into a tense and anxious business from which the arts are absent".

Amen to that. Music not only enriches life, it even at some level makes it possible. People with brain damage, notes Storr, can perform tasks with the aid of music that they're unable to do without it. When you've got a nagging tune on your mind (a harmony in your head) it's there for obscure and complex psychological-physiological reasons, but that's generally a good thing, probably aiding your mood or physical state. And it's a reminder, says Storr, that music is "an integral part of our inner life, and therefore of living itself".

Storr's preoccupation is with classical music, and I'm fine with that. And I think his insistence on the deep value of music is entirely right. I'll end this little ode to Storr with a quote from the composer Michael Tippett which Storr cites in his book. In my case I'd just replace the word "symphonic" with the words (interchangeably) reggae/blues/punk/drum and bass/ska/noise/any:

"Symphonic music in the hands of the great masters truly and fully embodies the otherwise unperceived, unsavoured inner flow of life. In listening to such music we are as though entire again, despite all our insecurity, incoherence, incompleteness and relativity of our everyday life. The miracle is achieved by submitting to its organised flow …".

Thursday, 16 February 2017

Completely unbidden, a Crass song came into my mind as I sat down to post this exciting new podcast. Know what it was? Do you? Eh? Eh ...? Well, it was their lovely little diatribe Heard Too Much About. As far as I can make out, the song (all one minute and nine seconds of it) was about the tribalism of social class and class politics. Something about how working-class identity politics are just another trap, like most things associated with regular politics. I hear ya Mr Ignorant, I hear ya.

Well, this furious feline has decided he's had enough. He's going to do something about it.

But ... it's only a stencil and not real life though. He is, like they say, just acting out. Know why? He's extremely disheartened. He's downcast, disconsolate, depressed. Basically, he's in a really unhappy place ...

Sunday, 12 February 2017

Another in a (very) occasional series in which I take photos of one of my record sleeves when something catches my eye - Lucky Millinder & His Orchestra's Apollo Jump LP.

This is nice because of the grainy black-and-white photograph and the fact that ... er, there's a very large radiator in the room where the band are congregated. Glad they were keeping their swing sounds ... hot.

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

What is it with the heart symbol at gigs? For years people have been scrawling a heart sign on my wrist as I thrust a fiver in their direction to gain entrance into their sweaty little gig.

I don't mind, of course. It's better than a swastika or a boring number or something. But nevertheless, why this infantile drawing, as if we're all still at primary school, just learning how to tie our shoelaces and say our two-times table?

Crossing you off my prayer list

Hmm. I guess it's just easy. And conveys a simple "good feeling" vibe, a bit like the smiley face they sometimes used to etch into the Es that people gobbled down like there was no tomorrow back in the heyday of rave. "Loved up", dancing not fighting.

A few years ago, I went through a mini-phase of slightly resenting people grabbing my wrist and (almost without asking sometimes) writing on it with a marker pen. One time some clumsy oaf even managed to get marker pen ink all over the cuff of my shirt. Nice one!

Anyway, these days I don't really care and the heart symbol is almost touching in its simplicity and childishness. After all, there’s something slightly infantile about grown men and women (some like me not exactly youngsters) congregating in a little room to hear songs about love (and other stuff) by a few 20-somethings who are barely older than children themselves.

This particular heart pictured on my extremely manly wrist comes from last night's gig from Pet Crow and Pale Kids in Nottingham. A heart is rather appropriate, given Pale Kids' tremulous, lovelorn sound. They're the Undertones for in-love millennials who don't mind carrying their hearts on their sleeves ...

Saturday, 28 January 2017

As we all know, we're living in an age of hyper-disposability. Don't like that jacket anymore? Chuck it. Got an "old" phone? Fuck that! Get an upgrade. TVs, fridges, cars, houses, even "lifestyles": get something newer, brighter, better. (Even partners. As per the old joke: "He's traded her in for someone younger, thinner and blonder").

Out with the old, in with the shiny and new. Which brings me to the matter of ... er, CDs. Specifically, people just throwing 'em away.

Such is the current contempt for these once futuristic little polycarbonate plastic discs, it's starting to become quite common to see them disposed of in the street. Last week there were two big cardboard boxes of CDs left out on the pavement near my office in east London. There was a scrawled message, something like "Free music CDs. Lots of genres". They were probably all utter rubbish, right? No, not really. Using up a few precious minutes of my lunch hour, I emerged from my quick box-rummaging with CDs by … Low, Jeffrey Lewis, Tarwater, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, Alasdair Roberts, Keith Hudson and Clinic. They might have been dumped in the street, but this wasn't trashy music.

Landfill CDs

So what's going on! OK, I know. Someone's been "digitising". Ripping their embarrassing, old-fashioned CDs so they can walk around with all their groovy music safely deposited on their phones. Yeah, but why not keep the CDs as well, with their liner notes and artwork, and their relatively neat jewel cases? Alright, maybe it's space - not enough room in their undersized, over-priced flats in Clapton or Bow. Could be, but I reckon they're still finding room for all sorts of junk, including - I don't doubt - a 65-inch monstrosity of a TV.

No, it's obvious that CDs have become deeply unfashionable. Compared to vinyl, it's as if CDs don’t exist these days. While everyone is supposed to have now fallen back in love with records, CDs are being left on the shelf. (Or rather, they're being taken off the shelf and ... unceremoniously thrown away). Or, if not thrown away, they're ending up in charity shops in large numbers. I've just this afternoon returned from a (rare for me) little trip to a few charity shops in north London: lots of CDs, very few records. I even bought some (CDs, not records).

It's all a bit peculiar. Take this recent Noisey article on a bloke in the West Midlands who makes a living out of buying music from charity shops then selling it online. The article’s called "From Charity Shops to Garbage Dumps: How One Guy Made a Career Out of Hunting Old Vinyl". And indeed he does. Except one of the photos in the article shows a Status Quo CD, which he's clearly also re-selling. But CDs aren't cool so they're not mentioned in the article ...

... which is itself a strange turn of events. I remember when CDs were so fashionable they were pre-fashionable. In my early record shop days (1984) the place I worked in had a tiny handful of CDs, nearly all classical, and all quite expensive. To me they were a mystery. A colleague said "Oh, the classical music buffs like them because the sound quality's really good and you can't damage them”. Then the success of Dire Straits' godawful Brothers In Arms became a marketing tool for CDs in pop music and ... well, you know the rest. One thing I recall about the early days of CDs was how some of the more "progressive" independent labels went in for them: Factory, 4AD etc. I began to take more notice of these shiny plastic cartons thereafter. A bit like some of the restrained, design-conscious outputs from these same labels, the slightly-mysterious-while-unassuming-but-undoubtedly-modern nature of CDs gradually began to make a little sense. And now they're just junk!

But it's all rather fraudulent really. Despite the supposed "fairy tale revival" in vinyl, CDs are currently outselling LPs 25:1 in the UK, with over 53m CDs sold in 2015 versus two million records. The industry people (presumably with a view to trying to make more money out of it) are even talking about the "resilience" of the format. Yep, so resilient they can even stand being left out in the rain in the street and still sound OK when you rescue them and stick them in the CD player at home later ...

So no, they're not dead. They're very much alive, still embarrassing format snobs and still taking up room (I'm glad to say) in lots of local libraries.

Though I've ended up with a good few hundred of them, I don't think I've ever bought a brand new CD in an actual record shop - and I doubt I ever will. Instead, I'm probably destined to acquire more and more of these plasticky things as they get chucked out in ever growing numbers.

But hark! Can you hear the sound of splintering CD jewel cases? A book (on music) I'm reading at the moment mentions how human beings can identify the direction of a sound to within three degrees of accuracy (an owl does it to one degree apparently). When it comes to that familiar sound (crash, scrape, splinter, tinkle) of chucked-out CDs, I can do it with an error rate of absolute zero. Please, dear reader, kindly dispose of your best CDs in a street near me ...

Tuesday, 17 January 2017

What's that! You don't like the podcasts I keep serving up on this site? For shame! Wash your mouth out with soap and water. (Or take advantage of a laverie libre service on the nearest rue to you). No, we can't allow such foul language on this site (or at least we'll pretend we didn’t hear it). So, moving swiftly on and without further ado, here's podcast #137. It's long awaited. It's been coming for ages. And now it's almost here. It's ... due Wednesday 18th January ...

Hmm, bit tired of those, click across to Bandcamp or Soundcloud or Summatelse.com and give those a go. Nah. Boring. Try another link. Click. Enter. Return. Close that page, try this one. Ahh, the joys of digital ... it's never-bloody-ending. Truly, deliciously, inexhaustible. Have you ever tried one of those big YouTube playlists? They go on for EVER.

OK, let's ... take a moment. I've got nothing against all this. I gather some people are sniffy about the extreme randomisation of music consumption enabled (encouraged?) by the internet, but I'm perfectly happy with it. Chance connections, accidental musical discoveries through mis-typed searches - they're all part of the fun. Seemingly endless music only a quick search away - bring it on. But at the same time I think there's a place for something clunky, limited, and altogether more unfashionably solid. I’m talking about ... well, I’m talking about CDs borrowed from the local library. Yep - remember those. Libraries! So that's what this blog is about: how I got back into borrowing music from my local library.

Back in the day (let's call it the pre-YouTube era), I was quite the library user. In what would have been 1984 it seemed mildly amazing to me, a bookish, music-orientated 20-year-old, that I could actually walk out of my local library with several newish LPs under my arm. Books and records all in the same building! For free. Or at least, with the records, for a smallish charge.

Anyway, from those goth (and other post-punk-type) records I began to borrow in those days, through the Texas prison song collections (and masses of other things) I got out on cassette a few years later, I developed a life-long habit of augmenting my music listening with regular doses of stuff off the library shelves. For years and years. Different cities, different libraries. Until, one fateful day some time in 2010, I stopped. No more loans. No more cracked-jewel-case-with-ripped-inlay-card-"one-disc-missing" CDs for me. I'd hung up my library card for good.

Wanna know why? Of course you do! Well, banally enough I got all upset about an overdue items fine of about £15. A blatant injustice! Or so I thought at the time. And so Hackney Central Library lost one of its most loyal CD borrowers for good. Serve 'em right ... except of course I was probably wrong all along (maybe I had forgotten to bring that stack of CDs back for about six weeks).

Anyway, to bring this fascinating reminiscence to an end: I got back on board with the library only recently. The "historic" £15 fine (still there on the system!) was paid off and I was back among the greasy CD shelves, rifling through the reggae, browsing the "Experimental". These days most of the CDs are even free to loan. C'mon - that's surely good!

My point here (if I even have one) is that the local library as a comparatively large music resource is surely completely under-appreciated in the Zuckerberg/Pichai/Wojcicki-dominated age. Digital capitalism's ad revenue juggernaut versus the pathetic, terminally unfashionable wobbly-bike-riding library habitué. Jeez! Why even compare the two? Yet the half-dozen CDs I'm currently borrowing every three weeks from my local authority-funded library are providing a quite substantial extra source of music. It's my own musical torrent. Ethiopian stuff, Nigerian music, some pre-unification East German underground music. These particular recordings are possibly already available somewhere online and they're possibly free of charge as well, but quite possibly not, and anyway I've now got my hands on them and am playing them on my hi-fi at home, so that's ... good enough.

A mean mistreater of on-loan items

The moral of this story isn't that tiresome new-old idea about how solid, tangible artefacts like vinyl are "more satisfying" than downloads. I don't think they are. It’s the much more mundane - but not often-mentioned - fact that public libraries are er, quite big and therefore tend to have a lot of stock. Which means a lot of music to go through ...

In other words, a well-stocked library is truly a thing of beauty. And that goes double for a well-stocked music library.

I only got back into the library-haunting habit because I was at a loose end one hot afternoon last autumn and dropped into my local one for something to do. For about six years I'd foolishly thought I could fill the library music gap with downloads from the weird and wonderful world of the internet. How wrong I was. But now I've mended my ways. I've had my ticket stamped and I've currently got no overdue items. I'm back in the fold. See you in three weeks ...